although I had known him for only thirty minutes, I was beginning to like his style.
I said, “Well, so much for them. Let‟s hope his widow makes it. Maybe she saw something.”
“She‟ll never stool if she did. They‟re all alike.”
There was nothing more to do there until the autopsy, so we went up to the intensive care unit on the
second floor. Mrs. „Tagliani looked like she was on her way to the moon; lines sticking out of both
arms, a mask over her face, and behind the bed, three different monitors recording her life signs, what
was left of them. The coronary reader seemed awfully lazy, bi, bin, bipping slowly as its green lines
moved across the centre of the monitor screen, streaking up with each bip.
Nobody from the family was in sight. asked Dutch about that. He shrugged and smoothed the corners
of his Bavarian moustache with the thumb and forefinger of each hand.
“Probably hiding under the bed” was his only comment.
The intern, a callow young man with a teenager‟s complexion, told us the widow had suffered firstdegree burns over seventy percent of her body, had glass imbedded in her chest and stomach, and had
been buried under debris which had caused severe head injuries.
“What‟re her chances?” I asked.
“A Kansas City shoe clerk might take the odds,” he said, and went away.
“I got a man on the front door, another one in a green robe on this floor,” Dutch said. “Nobody can
get near her. Whyn‟t ya come with me? I gotta debrief my people.”
Mrs. Tagliani made the decision for mc. While we were standing there the heart monitor went sour. It
stopped bipping and the green lines settled into a continuous streak.
The machine went deeeeeeeeee.
“Schmerz!” Dutch muttered. I had heard the expression before. Roughly translated, it meant a sorry
state of affairs. I couldn‟t have put it better.
A moment later the intern and two nurses rushed in, followed by the trauma unit with their rolling
table filled with instruments.
We stayed around for ten minutes or so until they gave it up.
“Eins, zwei, drei,” Dutch growled. “One more and we‟d have us a home run. Looks like you made a
long top for naught, Mr. Kilmer.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I gotta call homicide, tell „em Tagliani‟s missus went across. I‟ll he a minute. You‟re stayin‟ at the
Ponce, right?”
“Right.”
“Nice digs.,” Dutch said.
He went into the ICU office, made two phone calls in the time it took me to straighten my tie, and
came back.
“1 hear you know the town,” he said as we headed for the parking lot.
“1 do if it hasn‟t changed in twenty years,” I answered.
He laughed, but it was a sardonic, humorless laugh. “You‟re in for a surprise,” he said. “Follow me
over to the hotel. You can plant your car and run out to the Warehouse with me.”
“The Warehouse?”
“That‟s what we call our layout.”
I told him that was damn white of him and we headed out into the hot, rainy night.
2
SIGHTSEEING
It was only a few blocks back to the hotel but I saw enough through the windshield wipers and rain to
tell me what twenty years had done to Dunetown. These were not the wrinkles of time; this was a
beautiful woman turned whore. Tagliani‟s death had started the worms nibbling at my stomach. One
look -at downtown Dunetown turned the worms to writhing, hissing snakes, striking at my insides.
Twenty years ago Ocean Avenue was a dark, romantic, two-lane blacktop, an archway of magnolias
dripping with Spanish moss, that meandered From Dunetown to the sea, six miles away. Now it was
Ocean Boulevard, a six-lane highway that slashed between an infinity of garish streetlights like a scar.
Neither tree nor hush broke up the eerie green glow, but a string of hotel billboards did, their flashing
neon fingers beckoning tourists to the beach.
Front Street was worse. I was so shocked by what had happened here that I stopped the car, got out,
and stood in the rain, staring at a street gone mad. It was so far from the Front Street in my freeze
frame, I couldn‟t relate to it.
The Front Street I remembered was like the backdrop of a Norman Rockwell painting. There were
two old movie houses that showed double features. There was Bucky‟s drugstore, which had a
marble-top soda fountain where you could still get a milkshake made out of real ice cream and sit in
an old-fashioned wire-back chair to enjoy it. And there was the town landmark, Blame‟s Department
Store, which filled an entire block. The people of Dunetown once got everything from their diapers to
their funeral clothes at Blames.
Gone. No more Bucky‟s, no more Blame‟s, and the two theatres were twenty-four-hour porno houses.
A neon blight had settled over the heart of the town like a garish cloud. Hookers peddled their bodies
from under marquees to keep out of the rain, hawkers lured out-of-towners and footloose horseplayers
into all-nudie revues, and “bottomless” and “topless” signs glittered everywhere. The blaring and
oppressive beat of disco music was the street‟s theme song.
I had been there before, along Hollywood‟s strip and in the Boston combat zone. The scenario was
always the same. You couldn‟t buy a drink in any bar on the street without staring at a naked bosom
or getting propositioned by a waitress—or a waiter, depending on your inclination.
My God, I thought, what‟s happened here? How could Chief and Titan have let this happen to a town
they had once treated like a new bride?
The neon blight held the next six blocks in its fist.
And then, as if some medieval architect had built an invisible wall right through the middle of the
city, the neon vanished and Dunetown turned suddenly elegant. It was as if time had tiptoed past this
part of town with its finger to its lips. Old trees embraced mansions and two-hundred-year-old
townhouses. The section had been restored to Revolutionary grandeur with spartan and painstaking
accuracy. Gas lamps flickered on the corners, the streets were mostly window-lit, and there were
flower-laced squares every three or four blocks, fountained oases that added a sense of symmetry and
beauty to the place.
My reaction was simple.
The town was schizo to the core.
3
DOOMSTOWN
Dutch was waiting for me under the awning in front of the Ponce, the political watering hole of
Dunetown, a grand, old, creaky hotel, dripping with potted plants, and one of the few things in
Dunetown that hadn‟t changed. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of a bagged-out, nondescript
suit, and a Camel was tucked in the corner of his mouth. If he had a care in the world, it didn‟t show. I
parked behind a large black limo, gave the keys to the garage man, checked in, gave a bellhop five
bucks to drop my bag in my room, and tossed my briefcase into Dutch‟s backseat.
As 1 crawled into the front seat, I was still shell-shocked from the sights and sounds of Dunetown.
“Okay, let‟s roll,” he said, pulling into the dark, palm-lined street.
He didn‟t have anything to volunteer; his attitude was still cooperative but cautious. And while I was
interested in getting the lowdown on Tagliani-Turner, for the moment 1 was more interested in what
had happened to the local landscape.
After a block or two of silence I asked, “What in hell happened to Dunetown?”
He stared over at me with a funny look on his face, then, as if answering his own question, said, “Oh,